The reaction to my first #1 retrospective thread has been boffo, and since I’ve never been one to stick to a schedule, I figured it’s about time to soldier on and look at the second full year in the history of the Hot (then Top) 100: 1957.
As a side note; it occurs often in the history of the charts, as it does here, that a single stays at #1 over the New Year. For the sake of completeness, I’ve decided that I will include those songs in the voting for both years.
That being said, here are the songs that made #1 in the US in 1957. What’s your favorite?
Unfortunately, I don’t have the bandwidth to keep up with these, but enjoying perusing them.
Too bad that the focus is, understandably, just on #1’s - songs like Susie Q, which have endured longer than most of the #1’s listed here, don’t get consideration.
An immortal riff composed and performed by one of the all-time great Masters of the Telecaster, James Burton, then a teenager.
1957 was my favorite year for good songs, but not these #1’s. Song that I thought were #1’s which beat all these are Buddy Knox “Party Doll,” Crickets “That’ll Be the Day” and Sonny James “Young Love.”
By the way, I couldn’t resist mentioning the song that didn’t do that well in Billboard but counting subsequent years sales would be the all-time #1 for records originally released in 1957. It was #1 on local Hartford radio in '57.
